Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/95

Rh given the sign.

HERE were now some thirty dark, hawk-faced young men gathered in the big office room. Ten of them took seats about a broad oak table. The rest stood in the rear, in the shadows, watching stolidly with emotionless eyes—they were all Indian today. That Stevens and Lane were names taken to avoid white prejudice against the Indian origin of the men only themselves knew, for no one else cared. There were many of Indian blood. Lane took the chair at the head of the table. But he did not sit in it. He stood, face upraised, hands outstretched, both hands with palms upward, fingers extended. Solemnly he intoned,

"Eemeeshee, our great Breath-Master, twin brother of the Wolf of the Skys [sic], we beg your guidance and your blessing upon us. Each day for one month, one of us has died. The voices have told us that this will continue until all who know the Elder Secret are dead. Will you, we implore you, ancient one, come from your dreams and aid us?"

Into the stodgy law-office stole an awesome breath out of Time, a breath from the far past of the glories of the Red Race. And into each dark expressionless face of the Indians gathered there came a brightening; a hope. Their ancient God lived. He had answered. He had not answered their prayers since their fathers were young men. All had felt his mighty breath stirring primevally in the dusty law office.

ANY hundreds of miles away, and many miles underground—a living being turned slowly from his vast crystalline instrument panel. It was good to hear his name "Eemeeshee" again upon the lips of men. Once, long ago, the red men had plagued him nigh to death with their prayers; he had shut off the listening electric ears of the huge machine that brought to him the thoughts of men up in the sunlight. Time had slipped by in the strange dream life he led. He had turned on the great magic ear again, and had heard but one voice questing him from among the many thought voices intermingling, the voice of Eonee Lane of Butte, Montana. Delicately he had sought with the directive dial needles for the source of that thought, and had almost brought the scene in the law office into his screens. But it was too far; he had given up after a time. Eemeeshee was not industrious.

Mayhap you have seen ancient Indian drawings of their gods floating in the air over the heads of their rulers. Horrible appearing things, with foot-long noses and wide ears like an elephant, gross bodies and peculiar looking limbs. Those artists were not liars, for

Eemeeshee's nose was over a foot long. The end of his nose turned up in a sickle from the weird growth that had distorted him—due to the peculiar rays of the ancient machine in which he lived. Eeemeeshee's head was vast and horrible too, and his body was a mass of flesh too vast to worry about any more and Eemeeshee hardly thought of his appearance. It was not important. Few things were important to Eemeeshee.

The growth rays of the machine in which he sat, and which had kept him alive through the slow drag of the centuries while he dreamed away his too numerous lifetimes, had made him grow unaccountably in some ways—in others not at all. His face was seamed and lined, yet the flesh was soft and pink as a baby's flesh. He belonged to a race unknown to surface man!

Long ago, his ancestors had found that certain machines of the God caverns, if one remained within them, kept one alive century after century. And the living in them was very pleasant, too.

The magic of the Gods who had built them gave to one endless dreams at the touch of a button. Endless dreams of love, of Goddess-like women, of glory and war and conquest. In fact, one had only to think when one had punched the dream button, and whatever one wished became a reality in a dream more vivid than ever was reality.

That family had few children. The dream life does not make for that. But some they did have, and servants by the score. So that wherever one of the great living machines was to be found, there was found one of the strange and ancient dwellers within. The men of the surface once worshipped these invisible listening ears, for they might be persuaded to do great magic for one, if one asked them correctly—and frequently.

OFTLY Eemeeshee turned from the listening place, his heavy breathing